The Space Between the Stars

by Anne Corlett

  “How long ago did you leave Earth?” he said.

  “Fifteen years.”

  As they wound their way through the sparse woodland, they were trailed by a clamor of late birdsong, their passing marked by shrills and whistles and stubborn loops of two- or three-note melodies.

  At the far end of the little lake, a flight of shallow stone steps led down to an ornate iron gate. They emerged onto a statue-lined walkway running the length of the sunken gardens. Below them, a flight of stone stairs curved down onto a paved terrace, with another few steps leading down to a tangle of little paths and hidden bowers that formed the garden itself.

  The bright scent of lavender merged with the deeper musk of damp moss. The noisier birds had stayed behind in the woods, and the only song inside the garden came from a lone thrush, perched on top of a green-stained lead satyr.

  Callan moved over to lean on the low wall that had always made Jamie’s stepmother nervous.

  Careful. Be careful.

  Jamie joined him, resting her elbows on the rough stone.

  “It’s not what you expect, is it?” she said. “I don’t know why they tucked the gardens away down here.”

  “I expect they wanted a place to come to when they needed to get away,” Callan said. “From all the bowing and scraping up at the hall.”

  The sun was a bare sliver of red now, just clinging to the craggy outline of the distant hills. In the garden the shadows deepened, darkness welling up and spilling over the wall into the fields beyond. The first stars were pricking into life, each one starting as an uncertain blur in the dark blue, only growing clear when you didn’t look straight at them. Strange how the stars didn’t change after you’d been out there. Wherever in the universe you stood, it was impossible to think of them as anything but pinpricks in a sky belonging to your world alone. You were always the center of the universe, with the spheres and the stars and other people’s stories turning around you.

  “What are you thinking?” Callan was watching her.

  “The universe,” she said, wafting a hand at the darkening sky. “Our place in it all. Little things like that.”

  “Ah. Those sort of thoughts. Reached any conclusions?”

  “Nothing that makes much sense.”

  He looked up. “All those years spent trying to get off this planet. Then close on a century digging ourselves in, setting up shop on every rock that looked like it could hold us. And here we are, unraveling it all, making our way back to a random little corner of the place it all started.”

  “We had to go somewhere,” Jamie said. “All those end-of-the-world movies. They were always about surviving. People looting and fighting. No one ever made a film where the main character had enough food, and no one to run away from, where they looked around and said, Right, what now?”

  “So, what now?” he said with a faint smile.

  “I don’t know.” She tried for an answering smile. “I’ll tell you when I get there.”

  He stepped in front of her, standing close enough that she thought she could feel the warmth of his body.

  “Why not tell me now?”

  There was such a thin sliver of space between them. If he just shifted his weight a little, they’d be touching.

  “Jamie.” He said it quietly, and somehow she managed to lift her gaze. He was looking down at her, his face shaded by the almost-dark. He lifted a hand and placed it on her shoulder, sliding it around so that it was resting on the nape of her neck, his thumb moving in barely perceptible circles on her bare skin.

  Her hands were down by her sides, feeling heavy and clumsy. She thought of touching him, but she couldn’t work out how. He shifted closer, his body just brushing against hers, his other arm coming up to rest across her back.

  “What . . .” She stopped. She knew what this was. It was beating in the air around them, writing itself into her skin. But she didn’t know what it would be if she leaned back and tipped her face up to his. One night, and then they’d both pretend it hadn’t happened? A few days together, trying to make it into something more, breathless with the sense of time running out?

  His hands were moving gently across her back, and she wanted to lean into his touch, pressing his palms harder against her skin, so that she’d be able to feel every contour and callus. But they’d been here before, and she remembered the look in his eyes as he told her they’d only hate one another in the morning.

  That was before he’d trapped himself here. What had changed? Had he looked at her and thought, This will do?

  The wall behind her prevented her from stepping back, so she slid her hands in between them, placing them against his chest.

  He drew back a little. “What is it?”

  She shook her head, her palms still flat against his body, just enough pressure behind them to be clear that she was holding him back, not holding on to him.

  He stood still for a moment, then breathed out hard and took a slow step back. The shock of not touching him sparked in her fingertips.

  “Okay,” he said.

  The air between them felt colder than it had been, as though night had finally rubbed away the last vestiges of the day’s warmth.

  He glanced toward the gate. “I suppose we should head back.”

  She nodded slowly. “Okay.”

  • • •

  The woods were almost silent as they made their way back to the hall. The evening birds had all settled down for the night. She wanted to say something, but she couldn’t find any words that wouldn’t sound trite or foolish. She wanted to tell him that she needed to finish this journey, and then she could think about what next. She needed time to unravel everything that had happened. And then . . . But she couldn’t say that. It would sound like she was asking him to wait for her to make up her mind, and that wasn’t it at all.

  When they reached the house, he held the door for her, and she thanked him politely. The dance was still going on, but they skirted the edge of the hallway, around to the bottom of the stairs, where he said good night and went upstairs without looking back.

  After he’d gone, she wandered on along the corridor, too restless to think of following him upstairs. Where was that room with all the strange things? She tried a couple of doors. A parlor. A study. Then a locked door. If she remembered rightly, all the rooms on this side of the house were connected. The next door was unlocked, and she opened it and stepped into the library. She’d loved this room, with its ranks of perfectly matched spines, stretching from floor to ceiling.

  The far door had no keyhole, but when she turned the handle, it didn’t budge. When she looked up she saw that it was bolted at the top. There was a set of library steps nearby, and she pulled them over, picking up the hem of her dress so she could climb up and drag the bolt back.

  The room beyond was much darker than the library. She felt along the wall and found an old-fashioned brass switch. The lights stuttered into life, their dull glow revealing a sitting room hung with faded tapestries of birds, pressed behind glass panels. Groups of low-backed chairs formed little furniture archipelagos, and the heavy wooden shutters were chained shut.

  The room was full of dust. It lay in graying piles on the worn carpet. It was heaped up by the main door. The air was thick with it. She pressed her hand across her mouth.

  Footsteps sounded behind her, and an odd, offbeat tap tap tap.

  “Close the door,” a voice said. Jamie dragged her gaze away from the room of dust and turned to see Cora Barton leaning heavily on her stick as she made her way across the room. “There’s nothing to be done here.”

  When Jamie didn’t move, the old woman muttered something, reaching past her to pull the door shut.

  “How many?” Jamie stared at the closed door.

  “Sixteen.”

  “Why did they all die in there?”

  “What else could we
have done?” The other woman’s voice was sharp.

  “You locked them in there?”

  Cora Barton was small and stooped, but Jamie had a desperate urge to turn and run and keep running until there was no chance of hearing the tap tap of that stick coming along behind her.

  “We were here when the quarantine began,” the old woman said. “It was all terribly civilized to start with. All of us—the staff, the guests—agreed to isolate ourselves as best we could. Sleeping in different parts of the house, and in the cottages. Eating at different times. Then the reports started coming in. About what was happening on the central worlds. How the virus worked. How few people survived. The staff broke the quarantine and went home, and we were left here. We knew what we had to do. Stay right away from each other. Even the couples. But some people panicked. They didn’t want to die alone. They wanted to be held.”

  “So you just locked them in?” Jamie was shaking as she walked over to grip the back of a chair.

  “If we hadn’t, we’d all have died,” Cora said. “We couldn’t save them. And they wouldn’t save themselves.” She shook her head. “Dying for the sake of a touch.”

  “There are worse things to die for,” Jamie said, and immediately wondered if she believed it.

  “How did you survive, then?” the other woman said, narrowing her eyes. “None of us are in any position to judge. We’re all here because we didn’t go to the people dying all around us.”

  “Was your husband in there?”

  Cora turned away. “It doesn’t matter. It’s done. We’re here. They’re not. And it’s not as though we’re going to be called to account for what we did and didn’t do in the last days of the world.”

  “The last days?” Jamie said.

  “What else would you call it?”

  “Life,” Jamie replied. “Not an end. Not a new beginning. Just another bit in the middle, and who knows what comes next?”

  “Nothing,” Cora said. “There’s nothing left to come. This is the end, and all we can do is live it as best we can.”

  Jamie laughed, a harsh burst of sound that caught in her throat. “This is the best you can do?”

  “What are you doing?” Cora said. “What makes your way of ending better than ours?”

  Jamie couldn’t be in this room any longer. Not with the old woman huddled there like some emissary of death.

  “No,” she said, not sure what it was that she was answering, and then she turned and walked out of the room, stumbling a little on the hem of her ridiculous dress. She didn’t look back, but she could feel the other woman watching her until she was out of sight.

  CHAPTER

  23

  Jamie didn’t expect to sleep well, with the dust of that room swirling in her mind. But when she closed her eyes, she didn’t open them again until the sun was up.

  Once she was dressed she headed downstairs, waiting until the kitchen was empty before slipping in to throw together a hasty breakfast. She found Finn around the side of the house, sitting on a bench with a mug and a plate of buttery toast.

  “Not eating with the others?” she said, sitting down beside him.

  “They talk funny.”

  “They’re pretending,” Jamie said. “Pretending that it’s a long time ago.”

  He gave a quick shake of his head. “Not that.”

  “What do you mean, then?”

  He frowned down at his hands. “What they say, it doesn’t fit.”

  “Fit?”

  “With their faces. They don’t look like what they’re saying.”

  For a moment Jamie was back in that dust-soaked room. She took a hard gulp of her coffee. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ll be gone soon.”

  “What will they do?”

  “I suppose they’ll live here.”

  “Until they die?”

  “I guess so.”

  Finn was silent for a moment. “There are no babies,” he said eventually. “Are there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have to have babies. They’re what comes next. After people are dead, their children have more children and that’s how it all works. But Rena said there would never be any more babies at all.”

  “We don’t know that.” There was a little ache in her stomach.

  “But if there are no babies, what will happen?”

  “I don’t know,” Jamie said. “We just have to live our own lives and not worry about what happens after us.”

  “Until we die?”

  She nodded.

  “And one day there’ll be no one left?”

  “I don’t think that will happen,” Jamie said. “Nature’s cleverer than we are.”

  “I’m the youngest.” Finn was staring out across the hills.

  “The youngest?”

  “You’re older than me. And Callan, and Lowry, and Rena. And the people here. You’ll all die first. I’ll be last.”

  “We don’t know what will happen.” Her throat felt tight. “They haven’t tested properly. It was just what they thought might happen. We won’t know until . . .” She broke off.

  “Until you try,” Finn said.

  “That won’t . . .” The conversation was twisting and tangling, drawing in all sorts of ideas she didn’t want in her head right now. “I won’t be having a baby.” She forced a smile, trying to make a joke of it. “I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for that.” As Finn glanced at her mouth, she waved a hand. “No, I just mean I’m older than most people are when they start having babies. And I don’t have . . .” She ground to a halt again.

  “A husband,” Finn said. “You need a husband to have a baby. Yours is still on Alegria.”

  “He wasn’t my husband.”

  “Will you go back?”

  “No.”

  He was still considering this when the crunch of gravel signaled someone approaching.

  Callan stepped into view, hesitated, and then walked toward them.

  “We’re about ready to head off.”

  “I’ll need to get my things,” Jamie said.

  “I’ve packed my bag,” Finn volunteered.

  “Very efficient.” Callan gave him a quick smile, but Finn was looking out across the fields again.

  Jamie tipped the dregs of her coffee onto the grass. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  “No hurry.” Callan sat down next to Finn, stretching out his legs. “I think the old folk would be happy if we stayed longer, but I said we wanted to get on. Unless you want to spend the morning here?”

  “No.” Jamie’s voice was sharp.

  Callan raised an eyebrow. “Okay. See you around the front.”

  Jamie rinsed her mug, then went upstairs to pack. She’d loved this place once, but now she wanted nothing more than to be away. She needed to finish this journey before she lost hold of everything she’d ever been. Little pieces of her were splintering away with every step she took. Old loves, old dreams. When they were all gone, what would be left?

  The old people had gathered on the steps to see them off. Someone had repacked their bags on Emily’s back, and Finn was holding on to the lead rope. Callan and Lowry were shaking hands with some of the men, while Mr. Hendry looked on, palms pressed together under his chin in an affected, contemplative pose. When he saw Jamie, he dipped his head, his steepled fingers tipping toward her.

  “It’s been such a pleasure,” he said, to a fluttering chorus of agreement from a few of the women. “When you are settled, you simply must come back and see us.”

  Jamie nodded but didn’t answer. Cora Barton was standing a little to the side, and when their eyes met, she inclined her head, her expression cool and watchful.

  “Let’s go.” Jamie started to walk down the path.

  As they reached the road, Lowry fell into step besi
de her.

  “What is it?”

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, it obviously does. You couldn’t wait to be away from there. It was all a little odd, I’ll grant you, but harmless enough.”

  “Harmless?” She gave a hard laugh. “You ask them what they did to survive?”

  “No. And I’m not sure any of us would like to be asked that question.”

  “I’ve got nothing to hide,” Jamie said, sharply.

  “So what were you doing on Soltaire?” Lowry asked. “That young man of yours, did he want you to go?”

  “We didn’t know what was coming. It’s not like I left him so that I could survive.”

  “No,” Lowry conceded. “But you probably survived because you left him.”

  “So did he.”

  “That’s true,” Lowry said. “But first you broke his heart.”

  “Are you saying I should have stayed with him, just because he wanted me to?”

  “Not at all,” Lowry said. “I’m just making the point that none of us go through life without blame sticking to us for something.”

  Jamie shook her head, impatient with the conversation. “It doesn’t matter. We’re going. They’re the ones who have to stay and live with it.”

  “We all have to live with what we’ve done and seen,” Lowry said. “That’s all we can do.”

  “I’m going to walk on ahead.” Jamie picked up her pace. “See where we are.”

  “I thought you knew the way,” Lowry remarked, mildly.

  • • •

  They made better time than Jamie had anticipated. It was early afternoon when she suddenly realized she was walking through countryside that was as familiar as breathing. They followed the road through its illogical twists and turns, passing a few groups of sheep grazing contentedly on the verges. At one of the bigger farms, a couple of rangy collies came bounding out, sniffing and wagging. The sun was beating down and the tarmac ahead seemed scattered with deep puddles, the sky reflected in a shifting, shimmering mirage that Jamie knew would fade and disappear as soon as they got close.